More than a year ago, a friend of mine was totally excited about microtype features in LaTeX. He was talking about it quite a bit and then said to me: "Show me your document, let me add some lines of ...

Should I always load the microtype package with pdflatex?
Could it produce unwanted effects a naive user (like me) might ignore?
Are there any known issues as for compatibility with other packages?
...

Update: 2013-04-18
After upgrading to microtype 2.5 today this specific test cases indeed runs much faster (from approximately 3:00 minutes down to 8 seconds). However, I do have another cases where ...

The microtype package allows to completely suppress ligatures. However, this feature requires pdfTeX 1.30 or newer. That's unfortunate if I'm using LaTeX or XeLaTeX while having to avoid ligatures.
...

In French, we put spaces before characters : ! ; ? when we type the text. For instance, we will type
Que fait-on ? On met un espace avant les deux points : comme cela.
If I do so and use microtype, ...

While finishing an article for TUGboat I came across a strange behavior of the protrusion mechanism of pdfTeX (as implemented by the microtype package). The character \ in typewriter has a negative ...

Some typographers say it's a good habit to increase the letterspace when writing words in caps or small caps. So my question is, how to do it with pdflatex and/or xelatex? And while we're at it, which ...

I am a few months into learning LaTeX. I would like to use microtype with LuaLaTeX and I would like to obtain letter spacing for my smallcaps. I've tried to follow some of the threads on the subject ...

When the microtype package is loaded a quote environment which starts with punctuation marks is inconsistent "indented". The first line in the following minimal example is unaffected, i.e. at the same ...

I'm using the microtype package (microtype beta 2.5 build 08) to modify my document and I'd like to retain its functionality across all font shapes with the exception of small-caps (\scshape). How do ...

I really like the font configuration (appearance) of the documentation for microtype package (see here). How do I find out the combination they're using? (I will fix the protrusion etc later but first ...

While I was discussing another issue I came across this problem:
I included the xfrac package and the compile time of my document 100folded. After playing around I found out that microtype caused the ...

I have a weird problem. If I compile with LuaLaTex and microtype some of my line breaks are messed upped, but I don't get any warnings. XeLaTex with/without microtype or LuaLaTex without microtype are ...

There are many way to influence line breaking, and avoiding overfulls on long unbreakable pieces of text. I'm puzzled.
We are told that using \sloppy document-wide is not good ,
that an alternative ...

When I render my documents using pdfLaTeX and microtype they look fine, but when I switch to XeTeX the right edges of justified text look terrible: some lines overlfow, and hyphens look "indented". Is ...

Motivation
TeX.SE as well as external resources contain information from as far as 2010 regarding e.g. LuaTeX, XeLaTeX, microtype, and popular dilemmas such as KOMA/memoir or babel/polyglossia, which ...

LuaTeX has limited support for microtypograhpy now, and it can be invoked if only type1 fonts are used. But is it possible for microtype to work with opentype fonts loaded with fontspec now? I have ...

Microtype adds extra space to the start and end of letterspaced text, configured via the \SetTracking command's "outer spacing" option. Unfortunately, xspace breaks this. For example, I define a few ...

For my documents, I have often used the mathpazo package combined with microtype and have found the result to be really good. Because now I need to create PDFs which contain a variety of diacritics ...

I'm using \textlsfrom the microtype package to increase space between letters, but I can't find a command that will make a text look narrow (or maybe a very narrow serif font?).
What is the best way ...

It is well known that pdfTeX tries to apply character protrusion in a clever way. When breaking a horizontal list into lines, (implicit) kerns for character protrusion are inserted near the edges of ...

I wish to use protrusion and expansion from microtype as I like the look you get with them. I use amsthm and typeset theorems in italic as usual (with \theoremstyle{plain}). With microtype enabled, ...

I wonder what the kerning option of the microtype package does? In the manual it says that kerning=true will give additional kerning. But how? Is this something that has to be specified in addition to ...

I am affected by the performance issues of microtype-2.4 and enter the last phase of an important work (fine-tuning of page breaks, overfull hboxes, etc.). The compile time with microtype is about 4 ...